The Death of Great American Cities
by MostlyVisibleLight
Summary: Taylor Hebert wants more than anything to save Brockton Bay from the many forces that imperil it, but some evils are harder to fight than others. Endbringers storming the beaches, gangsters interfering in politics, and strikebreakers suppressing the unions are trouble enough, but how can one girl stand against the impersonal and diffuse economic factors impoverishing her city?
1. 101

Connection 1.01

In my family, we had a tradition: We kept every sign and banner we made for every picket line and protest we marched for. If we won, we hung it on the wall as a trophy. If we lost, we kept it in the basement for the day we'd need it again.

I'd earmarked the empty spot on the wall above my bed for my most recent creation. I'd gone a little overboard on the arts and crafts side, but that was par for the course for me. I was old hat at making signs. I'd made every mistake in the book at one point or another, and learned from all of them. I used wood instead of cardboard so it wouldn't melt in the rain. I laid out my design in pencil before committing with paint to make sure it looked the same on the board as it did in my head. I used a ruler to draw straight lines for my text, and stencils for the letters so they'd be perfectly formed. My signs were downright professional. I could sell them, if anyone I knew had money.

This sign was my pride and joy. Aside from signs, I wasn't much of a painter, but I'd laboured for hours over my pop-art tooth. The caption read, "Teeth are a necessity we can't afford." It had everything a good sign needed: a double meaning, an ironic reversal, a pop-art tooth.

One week ago to the day, no settlement had been reached in the final round of contract negotiations between the Dockworkers' Union and the conglomerate that handled labour negotiations for the four big firms who dominated Brockton Bay's maritime shipping industry. In the final hours, Mr. Hedley of Hedley and Sons had quipped, "A dental plan is a luxury we can't afford, Mr. Hebert."

Hence the sign. It was ironic because without a dental plan we literally could not afford teeth. Was that a correct use of the word 'ironic'? I didn't know what else to call it. It certainly wasn't funny.

"Are you all packed and ready?" Mom asked. She stood by the door in her practical rubber boots and rain hat. She didn't have a sign. She'd been working double shifts down at the munitions plant for the last two weeks and hadn't had time.

"All set," I said as I squeezed my feet into my own rubber boots.

"Do you have your umbrella?"

"Yes, Mom." I was going to need it, too. It had been raining cats and dogs all week and showed no signs of stopping. It was a good thing I'd learned my lesson about cardboard signs.

"Hat?"

"Yes," I said, slightly more exasperated.

"Lunch?"

"I already said I'm all set!"

"Okay, I hear you, just making sure," she said. "You know it's a long way home if you forget anything."

I glanced at the clock. "It's a quarter past eight. We were supposed to leave five minutes ago. We're gonna be late!" The clock didn't mention it and neither did I, but it was the morning of February 6, 2011.

Mom laughed. "We aren't going to miss the strike, Taylor."

I glowered, because that was so obviously not my point. I'd been to a dozen picket lines and protests in as many years, going all the way back to those embarrassing photos Mom kept showing people of me marching between my parents in the General Strike of 1999 at the tender young age of 3. If there was one thing I'd learned from that experience (beyond how to make a heck of a sign) it was that activism was a marathon, not a sprint. Keeping turnouts and spirits high through the fifth week or the tenth was infinitely more important than what happened in the first day.

Nonetheless, I protested, "All the big corporate honchos are going to be there for the official commencement at nine. This is our big chance to show them that even in the morning, in the rain, on a Sunday, we still have ten times more spirit than them. But not if we're late!"

Mom was looking through her purse, showing no signs of being on her way out the door, even though it was now sixteen minutes after eight.

I tapped my foot impatiently until the clock hit seventeen minutes after, at which point Mom took off her boots and went in search of something that she had apparently forgotten.

"I'm going to go!" I shouted into the house.

There was no response, and no sign of Mom finishing her last-minute preparations even though it was seven minutes past the time we'd distinctly set as when we ought to leave the house.

"I'm opening the door now!" I shouted.

"Okay, I'll see you at the picket line," Mom shouted back.

Did she think I was bluffing? Well, I was made of sterner stuff than that. When I said I'd be in a certain place at a certain time, I followed through. I took activism extremely seriously. It was in my blood. I could trace my lineage all the way back to Jacques Hébert, who'd been executed by Maximilian Robespierre for the crime of being too radical even for Revolutionary France at the height of the Terror.

I marched out the door with my umbrella in my right hand and my sign slung over my left shoulder.

It wasn't just raining cats and dogs, it was raining tigers and timberwolves. I regretted for a moment that we couldn't take the car, but the price of gas was through the roof and we were on living on Mom's income until the strike ended – Dad was adamant that the Union leadership couldn't draw paychecks while everyone else wasn't.

That we couldn't take the bus was a different contention. The buses were only running vital routes until the gas shortage ended, and as soon as the strike was declared all the buses to the Docks were abruptly deemed unnecessary. Dad called it suppression, and it kind of was, but it was also a fair point.

The last alternative I had ruled out on my own. I could've used my powers and made a forty minute trip into a four second one. I'd originally expected not to be able to do that because I was walking with Mom and obviously couldn't reveal my secret identity in front of her, but since I was alone that was suddenly not an issue. Still, I decided against it. I would be making this trip every day until the strike ended; in the morning on weekends, and in the afternoons after school on weekdays. If I got into the habit of cutting trips short, I risked accidentally revealing myself. No matter how careful I was, one-in-a-million chances added up.

And anyway, I liked to walk. It got my blood pumping. I also liked the rain, although the present downpour was a bit much for me. It was freezing cold February rain that pounded off my umbrella like a drum. My raincoat was waterproof, but the narrow gap between the bottom of my jacket and the tops of my boots got soaked almost instantly, and from there it was a slow trickle down to systematically soak my socks.

The Lord's Port was at the extreme north end of Brockton Bay, in the mouth of the Piscataqua river. It bristled with cranes, piers, and warehouses. Every day six vessels visited Brockton Bay – that was just big cargo ships, not the feeders that followed them like servants after a king. Each one carried hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo, either flowing in to go to the trainyard and ultimately the towns and cities to the west of Brockton Bay – or else flowing in from the west, through the trainyard, and onto the ships to faraway places. The Lord's Port was the beating heart of Brockton Bay's maritime shipping industry.

I walked fast and arrived at ten minutes to nine, plenty of time to spare. I supposed I didn't need to be quite so impatient with Mom after all. On the other hand, since I'd come alone, I didn't need to find an excuse to ditch my adult supervision and spread my wings. There was something terminally lame about hanging out with my parents. Some primal rebellious instinct made me irrationally pleased with myself to be independent and separate, alone in the crowd.

Despite everything lined up against it, the turnout was pretty spectacular. I couldn't begin to guess at how many people there were, but it was enough to form a semicircle across the wharf ten men deep, facing out to sea with angry eyes. All around, partial barricades had been set up the night before to prevent cars, especially the cops' heavy and difficult-to-maneuver armoured cars, from navigating the streets, a preemptive measure against the kind of strikebreaking tactics the city had used on us last time, two years back.

The bosses had given us plenty of motivation. The strike had three demands: First, a reversal of the pay cut they'd foisted on us in the last renegotiation, which was still the subject of angry dinner conversation to this very day. Second, a dental plan. For ten years we'd been fighting for a dental plan, but this time we'd make them cave. Third, paid sick leave.

All we wanted was what we were owed.

In the middle of our angry semicircle was the Pier of St. James (I had no earthly idea why it was called that). A metre above street level, it made a convenient stage, and I saw that the union spokespeople were lined up on one side. I recognized Dad at the far end and waved, but he didn't see me. Opposite them were the heads of the big firms. At the far end were Mr. Hedley and his two sons Mr. Hedley and Mr. Hedly of Hedley and Sons. On their left were Mr. Barnaby and Mr. Webb of Barnaby-Webb. Past them was Mr. Cooper of CSPD – his three business partners weren't present. Finally, there was a man I didn't recognize, who by process of elimination had to work for Associated Maritime. All of them had one thing in common: They were the enemy.

As I looked out, I heard a peculiar sound. It was like an approaching car, but it never passed. If you slowed down the sound of an approaching car so that you could hear it coming for ten or fifteen before it passed, it would be closer. It wasn't loud, but it cut through the noise of the crowd with perfect ease. I turned my head back, then left, then right, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Suddenly, I realized: It wasn't a sound at all. It was my superpower.

I had superpowers, of course. It had happened at the start of January in a lamentable incident I was resolved not to think or speak of ever again. In any case, mine were a bit peculiar. I had one which was extremely visible, dramatic, and attention-catching: I could create portals. Each was a single, immobile, freestanding two-dimensional object that occupied two planes of equal size at different locations. Anything passing through one pane came out the other.

At the same time, I had a second, invisible power, linked to the first, which served a necessary function that wouldn't have occurred to me if the first had been described to me. A typical human has no way to pick a particular area of space out of thin air in which to create a portal. Unknowingly, all my life I'd never given those niggling details much thought; I assumed superpowers just took care of that kind of thing on their own. And, in a way, mine did.

My secondary power was like a cross between echolocation and seismometry. Every time my heart beat, my power sent out an invisible pulse in a spherical wave all around me. When the wave met an object, a fraction of the pulse determined by the density bounced off it and returned to me, while the remainder continued through. These pulses, when they returned to me, were like a sound only I could hear, but much more precise. I could only speculate, but I assumed that my power felt to me like echolocation felt to a bat. The philosophical advantage this gave me over Thomas Nagel was only one of my incredible advantages. The pulse was the targeting mechanism for my portals; I could only make a portal in places I could distinctly sense with my secondary power.

It made me wonder if other capes had invisible powers that supported their flashier, primary ones. It hadn't escaped my notice that it would give me an advantage to keep my second power a complete secret.

Through careful experimentation, I had determined some of this power's behaviour. If I stood in my bedroom, one quarter of the pulse bounced off the walls and returned to me, and made the walls seem, for lack of a better metaphor, brightly-lit. The pulse that reached hall beyond was dimmer by a quarter, as if the wall between me and it cast a shadow. Three quarters of the three quarters that remained passed through the far wall into the bathroom, of which one-quarter bounced off and returned to me. Of that one quarter of three quarters of three quarters, only three-quarters passed back through my bedroom wall to reach me, so the far wall of the hall was only 14% as "bright" as the wall of my bedroom. While I stood in my bedroom, I could just about sense the inside of the bathroom well enough to make a portal, but that was as far as I could go. On the other hand, a sheet of metal blocked almost the entire pulse and prevented me from sensing or making portals on the other side. At the opposite end of the spectrum, particles of air hardly blocked the pulse at all. In open air, my range was about a kilometre.

Finally, and most curiously of all, living beings absorbed the pulse entirely, neither reflecting it nor letting it pass through. They were a complete blackout to me. They and anything behind them were utterly undetectable, yet simultaneously extremely conspicuous. I could always tell when there were people around because of the holes they poked in my echolocation-sense of the world around me.

Returning to the present, I was surrounded by people on all sides. They blocked my echolocation in every direction except directly above and directly below. The sense, which I had incorrectly interpreted as a sound, was coming from directly above. I clued in to what I was feeling like the last piece going into a jigsaw puzzle. The rain was falling sideways.

Not all of it, but far above, ten meters above my head, too far to be seen in the rain, there was a distinct yet intangible plane, like a forcefield. Almost exactly half of the raindrops that touched the plane abruptly changed direction and flew perfectly horizontally out to sea. The other half were unaffected, and fell on our umbrellas. It wasn't the wind; wind couldn't be so discriminating. Half, seemingly chosen at random, were falling straight down, the other half out to sea.

I pushed my way to the front of the crowd to get a clear extrasensory view. I followed the sound of the raindrops with my mind, but I couldn't sense far enough to tell where they were going. On a clear day I could sense a kilometre out, but it wasn't a clear day. I could do two hundred metres, no more.

Well, I had a trick up my sleeve.

I made a portal the size of a postage stamp. One end was in my cupped palm, the other as far out to sea as I could go, one hundred ninety-two meters (it was a peculiar side-effect of my power that I could judge distances exactly). With the next beat of my heart, the pulse found the portal in my hand and passed through. The second portal at the far end of my range felt as close as the palm of my hand, because for the purposes of my power it was. The second pulse began at one-hundred-ninety-two meters and travelled one-hundred-eighty-one of its own, for a total distance of three-hundred-seventy-three metres. I made a second portal at that distance, also the size of a postage stamp, leading to my other hand.

Now I dismissed the first portal, and all I had was one at three-hundred-seventy-three. At that range, the raindrops had all fused together into a continuous stream. Still, they were heading further out to sea. The sheer volume of it gave me pause. I had a worrisome suspicion.

I made portals in every direction, nine of them in a 3-by-3 grid, each two hundred meters apart, covering six hundred square meters. Across that entire range, something was taking half of the raindrops that fell and pulling them somewhere out at sea. I broke out into a cold sweat. I'd never heard of a cape who could do hydrokinesis on such a scale. It smacked of something much worse.

I dismissed my grid and pushed my range out further. Five hundred meters. Seven hundred. A kilometre. Out that far, the water swirled into a vast spiral. Suddenly, the portal in my left hand winked out. That happened sometimes, when they were hit with something at a bad angle, in a way that disrupted the boundary. I tried to reform it, but before I could, the one in my right winked out as well.

I started over, extended my range again. Five hundred meters. I sensed a mass of water rushing towards me before my portal winked out. A splash of pressurized water no bigger than an ice cube came through before the portal closed and hit my hand hard enough to sting. At four hundred meters, the portal behind winked out an instant after.

And suddenly I could see it. Out at sea, barely visible through the rain, a black, thunderous stormcloud racing towards us with a vengeance.

It had been fifteen seconds since I first sensed the strange rain. How fast was it moving? Was it a solid thing, racing at supersonic speeds, disrupting my portals with its bulk and the waves that preceded it? Or maybe the storm had broken my portals, in which case it might not be moving fast at all, but that was no reason not to panic. Either I'd been very unlucky, or the storm was uncommonly violent, or, worst of all, it was intelligent and disrupting me on purpose – but that was baseless speculation. For all I knew, it was just a hurricane.

Sixteen seconds. I knew that I should have shouted a warning already, but I was paralyzed. I hadn't had time to think.

Distantly, I realized that the strike was about to be officially commenced. I knew the plan was for a union spokesperson to dramatically rip up the contract and throw it into the sea, but they were all staring out into the ocean.

"What's that?" someone shouted, and pointed off at the cloud. It was definitely getting closer. It was definitely moving fast.

My paralysis was broken. "Get away from the water!" I yelled, as loud as I could. "It's coming right for us! Get away from the water!"

I'd intended an orderly retreat, but all I did was confuse people. A gaggle pushed past me and went to the wharf, trying to get a closer look. Some people gave me strange looks. No one seemed to recognize the danger. It was still so far away. They couldn't tell how fast it was coming for us. I could hardly see it through the rain.

I forced my way back through the crowd and bolted into an empty street. Brockton Bay had used to be a much bigger city than it was now, and the depopulation had been selective. Whole neighbourhoods of undesirable not-quite waterfront property on the north side of the city had been abandoned as people concentrated into the south near the downtown.

I ducked into a warehouse. My powers informed me that there was no one around. Quickly, I daisy-chained portals back to my house, which, as I had noted that morning, made a forty-minute walk into a four-second walk. I went straight to the basement and uncovered the old coal chute. There, in an old suitcase, I kept my costume.

My costume was extremely unfinished and mostly consisted of odds and ends. I had no resources to speak of, but my powers put every rummage sale and thrift store on the planet at my disposal. I had a bright red coat and almost-matching bright red had, and a black domino mask on an elastic band, and – other things I didn't have time for. I'd tried to make something that looked cool, but right now I just needed to conceal my identity and draw enough attention to make people listen to me. I didn't know how much time I had. I put on the mask, hat, and coat.

Instead of going straight back to the wharf, I came out of the roof of the warehouse. From there, I could see out over the bay. The thing was getting closer. I saw a swirling vortex of water, black clouds that roared with lightning, crashing waves and dense mist that obscured its body from sight.

I descended to street level with a door-sized portal right in front of the pier. All attention instantly focused on me. "Get away from the water!" I shouted as loud as I could. "Back! Back!" The wind stole my voice. The noise of the storm was twice as loud as it had been a minute ago. I distinctly noticed that the rain wasn't falling sideways anymore.

I felt someone come up beside me, and turned. It was, of all people, Mr. Hedley. "What's going on?" he asked, shouting over the wind. I could barely hear him.

"Everyone here is in danger! We need to get everyone away from the water!"

Mr. Hedley ran back to the pier and shouted at the union spokespeople and the other bigwigs. They followed him back. I was extremely conscious of Dad standing less than two meters away, and turned my face away so he wouldn't recognize me. He wasn't looking at me anyway. He was looking at Mr. Hedley, who was gesturing wildly. After a shouted disagreement that I couldn't make out at all, Mr. Hedley snatched a megaphone from a man I recognized as the Treasurer for the Dockworkers' Union.

A megaphone. Thank goodness. The needs of labour organization and the needs of evacuation, joined in perfect union.

"Tell them!" Mr. Hedley shouted, pointing out at the crowd. "They won't listen to me. Tell them!"

I didn't hesitate. I shouted straight into the megaphone, "Get away from the water! There's an Endbringer headed straight for us! Run! Run!"

In the following moments, I realized that I could have handled the situation much better.

The crowd went into an immediate panic. People ran in every direction, pushing and shoving in their rush to escape. I saw someone fall and could only hope he wasn't trampled.

Then they reached the barricades. Each one covered nine-tenths of the wide streets, only allowing pedestrian traffic and then only in small numbers. People pushed and fought to get through. I realized too late that I could have opened a portal on either side of each barricade to bypass them, but with the crowd pushed right up against the walls there was no way for me to get through – and, as living beings, they blocked my powers completely.

Quickly, I opened a portal leading from the rear of the crowd, closest to the water, to the furthest into the city I could reach, three blocks down inland. I made it twenty feet wide and ten tall, then raised the megaphone again. "Please proceed through the portal in an orderly-"

I didn't get to finish. Someone ran straight into the edge of the portal in the fight to get through, and it popped like a soap bubble.

A fortunate, or maybe unfortunate, weakness of my portals was what happened when people touched the boundaries. In theory, a portal was a wedge with an infinitely thin cutting edge. Put your finger through it the wrong way and you lose the finger. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, they didn't work that way. If a solid object passed through the edge of the portal, the portal lost its shape instantly and tried to close. If there was something in the way, it would stick to the edges of that thing until the way was clear. Once it was clear, the portal collapsed and that was that. They were harmless.

Harmless, but fragile. I made another one, and this time half a dozen people got halfway through before someone broke it again. The boundary lost its shape, contracted like an elastic band and stuck to the half-dozen people who were halfway through. They panicked. Half fell on the far side, half on the near side, all scrambling to get free. As soon as they were all clear, it contracted into nothing and vanished. I saw one of the ones who had fallen struggle to get up in the press. Another had her hand stepped on.

Suddenly, through the rain, I felt the creature enter my range. It was moving at a superhuman speed, at least two hundred kilometres an hour. I could see it now. Above the vortex, it had the torso of a naked woman, three meters tall but dwarfed by the mass of water below. He body was pale green and covered with ridges like coral.

It reached the wharf and kept going, not towards us but up the river. A tentacle with the same texture as the torso emerged from the water, then two, then four. It grabbed a crane with one and ripped it out of its housing in the same gesture, dropping it onto the pier where the union reps had been standing a minute before.

It didn't so much as glance, but apparently the destruction wasn't to its satisfaction, because in the next instant another tentacle wrapped around the pier and ripped it clear off the wharf, leaving only the concrete pillars it had rested on. The pier, a ten-metre long wooden platform, twisted and curled without its support. With a casual flick of its tentacle, the monster threw the pier into the ocean.

Just like that, the monster passed. A wave rose in its wake and crashed over us, reaching all the way to wet the barricades, but when it passed everyone was fine.

So where was the monster going?

In one step, I followed it a hundred meters upriver, then got ahead of it a hundred more. It showed no signs of slowing down. Two more jumps and my heart jumped into my throat. The bridge. The Sarah Mildred Long Bridge crossed the Piscataqua and connected Brockton Bay, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine. The monster was heading right for it.

I made another jump right next to the Brockton Bay side of the bridge. I could use a portal to redirect traffic to keep anyone from getting on the bridge, but where could I send it? I realized in the same moment that I didn't have time to think of an answer. The monster was moving too fast.

Before the next car could get into danger, I made portals across both lanes of traffic going onto the bridge, leading into the first parking lot I found. A red station wagon headed for the bridge slammed on the breaks rather than go through the portal and got rear-ended by the car behind it, which in turn got rear-ended by the car behind. The third car blocked an intersection, but I didn't have time to look. I raced across to the other side and redirected both lanes going onto the bridge from that side. I couldn't find a parking lot on that side, so I picked a street that wasn't as busy as the others and sent the portal there. A black pickup truck went straight through, panicked, swerved, and crashed through the front window of a clothing store, sending mangled yet stylish mannequins flying in every direction.

There was only one silver minivan left on the bridge when the monster plowed through it like a battering ram. Two of the towers supporting the bridge fell and crashed into two others like dominoes. The severed middle fell into the river, slanting the road steeply. The minivan lost speed trying to climb the slope. Just when I thought it would make it, the wave that followed the monster's wake climbed the bridge and smashed into the minivan. It swerved, over-corrected, and hit the railing of the bridge. The driver regained control, but the slope pitched further with every second. Slowly, the minivan started to slide down the bridge into the river.

I made a portal right behind it, but the minivan swerved again and broke the boundary. I tried again, with a portal right behind it. It went through, and its back bumper crashed into the street next to me. But the bridge was at such an odd angle to the street, it didn't roll through like I expected. It flipped back, pivoting on the back bumped, and fell into the top boundary of the portal. Just as the bridge fell away entirely, the minivan backflipped. The front, still on the bridge, pushed the top boundary of the portal down and down, and then the front was suddenly underneath the rest, and pulled the rest along, back through the portal, into freefall towards the water below. I made one more portal, just above the surface of the water, and the minivan fell through and landed upside-down in the middle of the street not three meters away from me.

A car I didn't see while I was watching the minivan came down the street at fifty kilometres per hour, swerved to avoid the minivan, swerved again to avoid me, spun out, and crashed sideways into the minivan at low speed.

An instant later, the monster doubled back across the ruins of the bridge, pulverizing anything unlucky enough to be in the water. Then it was racing back out to sea, back the way it came.

When I was sure the monster was gone, I ran to the minivan. The driver was struggling to get the crushed door open; in the back, three children were screaming. At least they were still alive and sensate enough to scream.

I looked back out at sea. I knew exactly what that monster was. A newborn Endbringer. One of Charybdis' spawn, there was no doubt about it. I supposed we were due for one.

All my elaborate plans for my debut were out the window, and what I'd got instead was a fiasco, but that was the least of my worries.

The worst Endbringers were the ones we couldn't catch and kill. The longer it lived, the stronger it would become. This one was faster than a car on the freeway, and on its first appearance. How many superheroes could catch up with a thing like that?

Off the top of my head, the only one who came to mind was me.


	2. 102

Connection 1.02

Immediately after my encounter with the Endbringer I put my mask and coat, the only parts of my costume I'd taken the time to put on, back in my hiding place in the old coal chute. Although I really wanted to change out of my soaked clothes and take a hot bath, I couldn't. Instead, I met up with my parents at the Docks and walked thirty minutes back to our house.

All my plans were straight out the window.

I had acquired my powers on Monday, January 3 and spent the month since planning and experimenting. I had always intended to be a superhero, but there were a lot of things I needed to take care of first.

For one thing, my costume wasn't finished. I had vivid memories of mocking wannabe superheroes with bad costumes. As a fifteen-year-old, I was always at risk of being seen as ridiculous. Having a good costume would show that I was willing to put the energy into making one. It would show that was serious.

On a more practical side, I wasn't done experimenting with my power. In a perfect world I would want to spend another month just trying things.

But there was an Endbringer on my doorstep. The issue had come to me.

It occurred to me that I had lots of strategic reasons to look the other way, or even flee. With my daisy-chains of portals, my power essentially had a global range. I wasn't limited to only fighting this one Endbringer in this one encounter. I could flee to Wisconsin and become a milkmaid, biding my time while I familiarized myself with my power. In a few months I'd be more ready to fight.

But I couldn't flee to Wisconsin or become a milkmaid. My family was here. My friends were here. The kids I'd babysat for every Saturday for three years were here. Barring a speedy evacuation (which was a contradiction in terms) the lives of a lot of people I cared about were in peril, and there was no guarantee an evacuation was even possible depending on how wide an area the Endbringer intended to terrorize.

I put a pin in those competing thoughts. Most pressingly, there were a few experiments with my power I'd put off for too long. One of them was unobtrusive enough to do presently, as my parents and I walked home. (And that was another thing that needed a lot of thought. I didn't know what the Union leadership was going to do about the strike, and I didn't think they did either. The Lord's Port was going to be shut down for a while whether we picketed or not; anything we did was redundant at this point. But that didn't mean it was over, just temporarily on hold.)

The experiment was this: Above the clouds, I spread a grid of portals spaced a kilometre apart over the Atlantic. I'd done this before, but I'd never extended it very far. There was no limit on how many portals I could make as far as I could tell, but I had never done it over a really large area. For instance, I had never tried to extend my pseudo-clairvoyance over a significant fraction of the Altantic ocean, out of a generalized caution against doing anything really big.

But there was no reason I shouldn't be able to.

I extended a grid, first five portals north and south spanning ten kilometres, then ten more east. Filling it in put me at a hundred portals and took about a minute. I found the Endbringer out at sea, heading south. I followed it down, extending as I went.

A hundred portals south took a thousand portals and ten minutes altogether. I didn't feel any strain from supporting that many, but the noise was too much to parse all at once. I felt like I was in a crowded room with a dozen conversations going on around me, and I could only focus on one at a time.

I focused on the Endbringer and its immediate surroundings. I watched – was it more appropriate to say listened? - as it took a wide turn and headed back for the coast, straight for Boston at the southwesternmost edge of my portal grid.

As aforementioned, I was stuck walking home with my parents for another twenty minutes, so I had nothing to do but make another two thousand portals. My intention was to make an excuse and abscond as soon as I was over the threshold, but Dad had other plans. After the obligatory "Are you okay?"s and "It was so close!"s and "Are you sure you're okay?"s, my parents had been silent for the walk home. Both of them had a lot to process, and to be honest so did I. Once we got home, though, Dad burst into a sudden flurry of activity.

"We need emergency supplies," he began. "Bottled water, canned food, and a first-aid kit. There's going to be a rush, so we need to get in before everyone else does. We also need a rendezvous point in case we get separated, and a backup rendezvous point in case something happens to that one, and a way to communicate in case-"

"Shouldn't we leave?" Mom protested.

"Our lives are here!" Dad said.

"Our lives will come with us as long as we don't die," said Mom. "Maybe we should go somewhere safe. We could go to Boston; people say there's work there."

"I don't think Boston is safe," I said.

It wasn't. The Endbringer had made land in Boston ten minutes ago. My portals were above the clouds and the clouds were more than a kilometre up, so I couldn't directly sense anything happening on the ground, but the Endbringer's private storm was moving north along the coast. If it kept going, it might hit Brockton Bay a second time.

I had too many competing thoughts to weigh. I'd decided against telling my parents about my powers weeks ago because I knew they'd never let me fight the Endbringers if they knew. On the other hand, I hadn't expected this. I had the ability to move us all to Michigan in five minutes; was that the right move? The Endbringer hadn't shown any inclination to go inland, but that didn't mean that it wouldn't.

I'd read every scrap of info on the Endbringers I could get my hands on. They were an enigma, but I knew the history of where they had attacked and when. There were twelve Endbringers (thirteen now; it was lucky that I didn't believe in unlucky numbers). Each one alternated between brief periods of activity and long periods of dormancy. While they were active, they chose their targets and attacked until they or the targets were destroyed. While they were dormant, they grew stronger, often emerging with new powers to shore up their weaknesses. Only four had ever been killed, all newborns and all within the past decade.

In any case, it was risky to apply any of those generalities. For any rule you cared to name, there was an Endbringer that broke it. Most targeted geographic areas, but Dark Horse targeted individuals and followed them wherever they went. Neither Babylon nor Charybdis had dormant phases. Scylla had a dormant phase, but it spent the whole time spawning proto-Endbringers that were if anything worse. They were nothing if not diverse.

There was a compelling case for evacuating my family, but it wasn't urgent. If the new Endbringer came inland, I would see it coming long before it posed a threat. Hear it coming. Whatever. We were in no imminent danger. For now I would keep my secret.

Separate from my reverie, Dad was still talking. "The most important thing is that we don't panic. The bridge is out and thousands of people are going to be piling onto the 95 as we speak. There'll probably be more deaths on the highway than there were in the attack. We're in less danger here than we would be if we tried to escape." He shook his head. "Taylor, I want you to go to the grocery store. I'm making a list."

"Okay," I said. I was listening to Boston. Not the band, the city, through my powers.

Internally I was conflicted. I could fight the Endbringer any time before it went dormant. I had never even tested using my power violently. Strategically I had lots of reasons to wait and no reasons to engage now. Strategically, there was nothing selfish, greedy, or wrong about getting our share of canned food before people started rushing the grocery stores, all the while, statistically speaking, people were probably dying in Boston. Nonetheless, I felt coldhearted just watching from a distance.

I had already skipped out on one Endbringer attack. Babylon had been besieging Seattle since early 2005. I could have gone to fight it at any time, but I chose not to. All of my good reasons still applied.

I needed to come to a resolution about these things sooner rather than later. I needed to give serious thought to what my plan of action for the next few months was going to be.

When Dad finished his list, I walked to the only place in my neighbourhood that sold groceries, Young's. Young's was a big box store living like a hermit crab in the hollowed-out shell of a former chain. It was one of the thousands of small businesses that had sprung up in the wake of the of the Antitrust Massacre of 2002. The facade was still the same shade of blue, and you could make out where the old letters had been ripped off. There was a big painted wooden sign saying "YOUNG'S" nailed to the wall above the doors.

If I felt like a jerk for pre-emptively rushing the grocery store thirty minutes after an Endbringer attack to get to the nonperishables before anyone else had a chance to, it was nothing compared to what I thought of the owner of the store when I saw her in the canned goods aisle tripling all the prices.

"Are you actually serious?" I asked, standing in the aisle with my empty cart, staring at the label that indicated that a can of corn cost $3.99.

"People will pay." The owner rose and turned to face me. Fat, mean, and old Mrs. Young, after whom the store was named. She had the air of a mobster more than a shopkeeer. I remembered her from the last time we'd met. Her workforce had tried to unionize in 2009. Labour was a tight-knit political lobby in Brockton Bay, so organizers from the Dockworkers' Union, the Teamsters' Union, and the Teachers' Union had all stepped in to lend their hard-won experience. The negotiations lasted six weeks and ended in violence. Dad had needed stitches.

"It's been half an hour and you're already price gouging?"

"Miss Hebert, always a pleasure. Obviously you, like me, realized that recent events have raised the value of these goods." She gestured to the canned food. "You wanted to buy them for less than they're worth, or you wouldn't have come straight here. Lucky for me, I was first."

I crossed my arms. "Just because there's going to be a panic doesn't mean canned corn is worth more. You bought it from a wholesaler. The price you paid won't change retroactively. You're just gouging to make a quick buck."

"On the contrary, the panic does mean it's worth more. Supply and demand, Miss Hebert. You're here half an hour after the fact, just like me. Does that mean that you, like me, anticipated that a mob of terrified soccer moms is going to buy me out of nonperishables before this evening? If that's the case, clearly demand exceeds supply. For the sake of everyone who's not as quick on the uptake as you or I, I need to raise my prices in order to lower demand so that I don't run out and everyone gets their fair share."

"You think $3.99 for a can of corn fair?"

"Do you think it's fair that the early birds like you get to hoard the city's supply of nonperishable food?"

It wasn't an entirely unreasonable point, which only made me angrier. I turned on my heel and stormed out of the store without buying anything. She wouldn't get a cent from us, but I still had a shopping list. I detoured through an abandoned alleyway and took a portal downtown. The first place I went hadn't changed its prices, so I did my shopping there instead.

Which one of us was the real bad guy? Mrs. Young, for price gouging? Me, for stockpiling limited supplies during a natural disaster? The general populace of Brockton Bay for its statistical certainty of panicking, thereby forcing people like Dad and I who weren't panicking to nonetheless descend to antisocial behaviour like hoarding?

Trick question; the real bad guy was the Endbringer. The rest of us were petty by comparison.

I spent the walk home working out a plan of action. When I could implement it depended on when, if ever, my parents planned to leave me unsupervised. Unfortunately for the people of Boston, I couldn't slip away for the entire afternoon and evening.

Dad was a planner by nature. He insisted that we sit down and decide on a rendezvous point (the house) and a backup rendezvous point in case something happened to the house (a plaza on the west side of town, on high ground). Then he wanted us all to get and memorize email addresses so that we could communicate if we were separated, and since we didn't have a computer we had to walk to the public library to do that. Then he wanted to hide all our valuables, our canned food, and our bottled water just in case the situation deteriorated to the point of roving gangs of looters.

I wasn't completely idle during all of this. A few minutes after hitting Boston, the Endbringer went back out to sea and further south, out of my grid. I extended lines of portals after it, but I couldn't keep up and also maintain total coverage, so I switched to a web structure with large gaps. Like a spider, I could tell how close the Endbringer was to any strand of my web by the strength of the storm that followed it. With my web, I tracked it as it made its attacks. Boston, New York, Boston again, Brockton Bay again (the south side of the city rather than the north, this time), up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, Lake Ontario, Toronto, Montreal, back down the St. Lawrence, Brockton Bay again, and so on. It never stopped moving and never stayed in one city to fight a protracted battle. At ten, an hour after it arrived, it fled under the surface of the ocean and out of my ability to track it. Unless it was very unusual for an Endbringer, it would be back soon. There were no recorded instances of an active phase that lasted less than a month.

Finally, at two thirty in the afternoon, after I'd memorized our backup-backup rendezvous point where we'd meet if Brockton Bay was destroyed and we were separated in the evacuation, the news started reporting on the Endbringer, which distracted Mom and Dad thoroughly enough to cancel everything else.

I could've slipped away, but I was as glued to the TV as they were. I still wasn't resolved on what to do, except that my reluctance had solidified into an intention not to do anything drastic until I'd had more time to come up with a plan.

A handsome anchorman spoke out of our television set: "Ladies and gentlemen, in the early hours of the morning, a new Endbringer emerged to attack the eastern seaboard. Officially named Endbringer Blitzkrieg by FEMA for its rapidfire attacks, it struck several cities in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions of the U.S. and Canada. With me here is superhero and Endbringer expert Armsmaster. Armsmaster, thank you for being here."

"Always a pleasure," Armsmaster replied.

Armsmaster was one of the most prominent national-level superheroes in the mainland U.S. He was also a native Brocktonite, or at least he'd spent the first few years of his public career in the city. I used to be a big fan, but (ironically) I'd sort of lost interest in capes when I started high school.

Armsmaster was wearing his characteristic chrome and dark blue power armour, which covered his entire body from head to toe including a heavy-duty gas mask. As he often said, exposed skin was a weakness he couldn't afford. From what I'd read, the armour weighed over a thousand pounds and was completely bulletproof, even the lenses over the eyes. Rumour had it that the armour disguised his voice so no one could use it to track down his mild-mannered alter ego, but if that was true it was impossible to tell hearing him speak.

"Armsmaster, you're one of the nation's leading experts on Endbringers. I know the incident is fresh, but what can you tell us about Blitzkrieg?"

"First and foremost, it could have been much worse. Blitzkrieg made no attempt to directly kill or maim, and other than those unlucky enough to be in its way there were few injuries and fewer deaths, at least by the standards of an Endbringer scenario. Racking up a bodycount wasn't part of its objective."

"Do you have a theory as to what its objective may have been?"

"Yes," said Armsmaster. "I believe Blitzkrieg is targeting bridges and roads."

The anchorman looked perplexed. "Bridges?"

"Mostly roads, although the bridges will be more difficult to repair for obvious reasons. The Endbringer made many hit-and-run attacks this morning, all of which followed a distinct pattern: It made land close to a bridge or span of highway, destroyed it, and then retreated. I have yet to find an incident of injury, death, or destruction which was anything but incidental to Blitzkrieg's main objective. It's a threat to those in its path because of it enormous bulk and the hailstorm that follows in its wake, but it pays no attention to people unless attacked."

I frowned. Armsmaster was wrong about that, I was sure. Blitzkrieg had clearly targeted the Lord's Port with malicious intent. On the other hand, that didn't necessarily contradict his theory. Roads, bridges, ports – if Blitzkrieg was targeting transportation infrastructure, it fit nicely.

"Speaking of attacking it, did you fight it? I know you were in New York this morning."

Armsmaster shook his head. "No, its attack on New York was over before I heard about it."

"Do you intend to engage it next time? Assuming there is a next time."

"I'd prefer to play that close to the chest. I still don't know to what extent the Endbringers are eavesdropping on us, if at all."

"Scary thought."

I watched the rest of the program out of some poorly construed notion that it would have important information, but Armsmaster had less information than I did. After fifteen minutes he was replaced by a professor of Parahuman Studies who didn't know anything at all.

I was reluctant to leave the house while my parents were both home and awake, in case they noticed I was missing. I spent the afternoon and evening loafing around waiting for night to fall. I didn't detect Blitzkrieg again, even after I extended my spiderweb of portals across the entire east coast of North America.

Mom and Dad stayed up later than they usually did on a Sunday. I was stuck laying in bed pretending to sleep until eleven thirty before they finally turned in. I had to be "up" for school at seven. That gave me seven and a half hours to work with.

I hadn't slept since the night of January 2. As far as I could tell, I wasn't even capable of sleeping anymore. Another one of those invisible secondary powers. It was common enough to be a documented phenomenon; a cape whose powers removed the need for sleep was called a Noctis cape, after the notorious serial killer.

As soon as Mom and Dad were in bed for the night, I snuck out to my favourite nighttime getaway, the Sahara Desert.

It was not hot in the Sahara at night. In fact, it was often cold. At night, the heat escaped very quickly. The Western Sahara was five hours ahead of my native New Hampshire, which made it four-thirty in the morning. It was just below freezing, but I was a New Hampshire girl so for me it was just sweater weather.

I didn't need to wear my mask. There was no one for kilometres around. The isolation was important; if the experiment I was about to conduct didn't go the way I thought it would, anyone nearby would be in terrible danger.


	3. 103

Connection 1.03

The experiment went like this: I made one portal facing down, with its other end directly below facing up. A trap; anything between the two would fall forever, at least in theory. I took a pebble and dropped it between the two. It fell through the bottom and out the top, through the bottom, out the top, and so on.

Then I ran away and watched from a safe distance.

The equation for calculating the kinetic energy of a moving object goes like this: Energy in joules is equal to 1/2 times the object's mass in kilograms times its velocity in metres per second squared. It was easy to understand: Consider a 2 kilogram object. It energy in joules is equal to 1/2 times 2 kg times velocity squared, which can be simplified to just velocity squared joules. If the object is going 1 m/s, that's 1^1 or 1 joule; at 10 m/s, 10^2 or 100 joules; at 100 m/s, 100^2 or 10,000 joules.

And how does the object accelerate? The basics are pretty simple: An object falling in Earth's gravity accelerates at 9.8 metres per second per second; put another way, every second it goes 9.8 m/s faster. After one second, 9.8 m/s; after two, 19.6, after ten, 98 m/s. That's complicated by wind resistance, which being a fifteen-year-old I frankly didn't understand. What I did understand is that different objects are resisted by the wind to different degrees, and that wind resistance increases as an object goes faster and eventually cancels out the acceleration altogether, preventing objects from exceeding a certain falling speed depending on its mass and size (called its 'terminal velocity'). For instance, a raindrop would never fall faster than 9 m/s, while a golf ball is limited to 32 m/s.

This was further complicated by the fact that in my portal trap, the air was falling just as fast as the pebble. I had no idea what would happen, which was why I decided to observe my experiment from very, very far away.

One minute forty seconds later according to my stopwatch, there was a sound like a thunderclap. The portal winked out. The pebble escaped and smashed into the ground hard enough to kick up some sand.

The sound made me suspect that the pebble had broken the sound barrier and created a sonic boom. That was unexpected, because the air in the portal trap should have been falling as well, and if the pebble and air were travelling at the same speed there shouldn't have been a sonic boom. In that case, either the fast-moving winds had disrupted the portal or the pebble had tumbled out of the middle and hit an edge, and the sonic boom came after the portal broke when the super-accelerated pebble and air hit the still air outside the trap.

On the other hand, the falling air particles would still be resisted by the non-falling air outside the portal trap, so there was definitely some resistance. Maybe there was a gradual transition from slower-moving particles at the outer edge of the portal trap to faster-moving particles in the centre near the portal, and the sonic boom was caused by the pebble exceeding the speed of sound relative to the air particles around it – say the air around was going 300 m/s and the pebble was going 700 m/s. The speed of sound is 343 m/s; the pebble fell for 100 seconds, so it would have a speed of 980 m/s minus whatever resistance reached it. It sounded plausible to my high-school educated ass, but I was just guessing.

What I really wanted was to make something go as fast as parahumanly possible and throw it at an Endbringer, then do it again ten thousand times in quick succession. Theoretically I was playing with powerful forces that lent themselves to being weaponized. In order to make my dream come true, my next step was to keep the portal open longer so the object inside could be accelerated for longer. I had a few ideas (what if the portals were in a vacuum? What if I blocked the portals from closing?) but before doing anything resource-intensive I wanted to narrow down what exactly was going wrong.

I knew the sonic boom and the portal being disrupted happened at the same time. I had two hypotheses: Either the sonic boom disrupted the portal, meaning that I had to stop the object inside from breaking the sound barrier relative to the air around it, or the forces involved had disrupted the portal and the sonic boom happened when the pebble hit still air. Either the boom caused the disruption or the disruption caused the boom.

Clearly I needed to do more experiments.

Next I made a cube out of portals. Each face of the cube led to the face on the opposite side. From outside the cube, I could stick my hand through any face and have it come out the other side without interacting with the contents of the cube. The inside faces likewise led to their inside opposites; top to bottom, left to right, front to back. The edges touched, so there was no interaction between the inside and outside. In theory that meant no wind resistance at all. Anything inside would definitely not cause a sonic boom, no matter how fast it went.

My experiments took three hours, and when they were done I was very happy with the results. I couldn't spend all night on it, though. My to-do list had accumulated a lot of entries. After planning, scheming, a break, more planning, and a brief shopping trip, I found myself on a Pacific island with a stolen video camera.

"Hey there world," I said into the camera's glassy eye, "Tesseract here." (Tesseract was my intended superhero name. It was important to name oneself before anyone else got the chance to.)

I watched the recording to see if I sounded as stupid as I thought I did. I didn't just sound stupid, I looked stupid, too. I had switched out my domino mask for a ski mask because I was skeptical that a mask that covered less than a quarter of my face would do much to hide my identity in a closeup. Now I just looked like a bank robber.

It was fifteen minutes to six (New Hampshire time) on the morning of Monday, February 7, which gave me an hour and a half before I had to go home and get ready for school. It would be best if I could finish the video and figure out how to upload it to the Internet before then.

I started again. This time I pointed the camera at my chest. "My name is Tesseract, the world's newest superhero." No, that was dumb. I probably wasn't even the world's newest superhero at this point.

I had underestimated how much time the video-making portion of my new, fleshed-out plan to kill Blitzkrieg would take. The more time I wasted here, the longer it would take me to get to the killing part. But if I looked like an idiot, the whole thing would be a wash.

A cool wind blew across the beach, flipping the pages of my open notebook. On a whim, I picked it up and wrote out 'My name is Tesseract' on a blank page.

That was better. No voice, no face, no body, no costume, nothing to trace, and no way to embarrass myself. I just wanted to get it over with, anyway. I wrote out some more bare-bones cards, going through my plan for the video in my head, then started the camera again and faced it towards a palm tree.

I held my notebook in front of the camera to show the first page, only letting my hand enter the frame. 'Blitzkrieg can go two hundred km/h.' I flipped the page. 'I can go faster.'

I had four portals ready to go for the purposes of showing off. They went to places with good views of world-famous landmarks: Big Ben, the Sphinx, Mt. Fuji, and the Statue of Liberty. I walked through them one by one, panning the camera across the scenery. When I was done, I held up the last page. 'To the Minutemen, the Guild, the Brockton Bay Brigade, or any other superhero team planning to fight Blitzkrieg: Contact me if you want to team up.' I ended the recording.

Close enough for government work.

This was the clumsiest, least cool way to get involved with a big superhero team, which was why it had not been part of my original plan. Videos like mine were common-ish, but I'd never heard of any cape successfully using it as a platform to jump into the big leagues. I wasn't sure how anyone ever did get to the big leagues, actually, but it wasn't by making lame videos on the Internet. Probably they did it by building a reputation based on solid superhero work, which I emphatically did not have time for. Blitzkrieg was forcing me to accelerate my plans.

The Minutemen and the Guild, led by Armsmaster and Narwhal respectively, were the two biggest North American cape teams (in terms of impact if not numbers) and the only two that operated coast-to-coast. Neither one of them had a street address or phone number, for different reasons. The Minutemen were embroiled in a decade-long war with organized crime across the Eastern Seaboard. It was a local legend that Marquis would pay ten million dollars for Armsmaster's head, even though Armsmaster hadn't come back to Brockton Bay in years. Some people said that was why he'd left in the first place. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Guild was officially outlawed by the Canadian government. They'd reintroduced the death penalty just for capes, so execution was emphatically on the table for any active member of the Guild caught by a country with an extradition treaty with Canada – the United States, for example.

Those were the Endbringer-fighting dream teams. Of the four that had ever been killed, the Guild was responsible for one and the Minutemen another. I really hoped they turned up for this one.

I'd included the shout out to the Brockton Bay Brigade because they were the only big Brockton Bay team and because they reliably responded to nearby Endbringers. I was sure they'd turn out for a fight on their home turf.

Blitzkrieg was forcing me to rush a lot of things I'd have preferred to take my time with. My original plan had been to work my way up slowly and systematically, but my original plan didn't figure on a near and present danger. It wasn't out of the question for me to fight the Endbringers single-handed, especially after the qualified success of my little experiment, but it was probably a bad idea. I had never fought anyone in my life, let alone a nigh-invincible killing machine.

I wasn't going to just let it be, though. That was the next stage of my plan, just as soon as it showed itself. My spiderweb of portals wasn't picking anything up, so I could only assume it was still underwater.

The libraries in Brockton Bay wouldn't open until eight, so I went to one in Manchester instead. After just shy of an hour of fiddling, I made accounts on Youtube and a few of the bigger parahuman-focused message boards and uploaded my video. After that, I changed out of my costume and was back in my room at five minutes to seven.

If my parents ever discovered that I was never in my room at night, I didn't know what excuse I would make.

I went straight to the shower. My Sahara trip had kicked up more dust than I had expected and my hair was caked with it. I shampooed twice to destroy the evidence, dressed for school, and joined my parents for breakfast.

Mom was at the table making notes on a new bus schedule. The routes changed too often as it was, and I could only imagine what the destruction of dozens of roads had done for that. Dad was making scrambled eggs and toast. He set them out on the table with coffee for Mom and himself and orange juice for me.

The radio was playing classic rock. Dad turned it down when he sat down. "We're having a Union meeting today. Our usual place is underwater now so I volunteered the house."

"I won't be home until late," Mom said without looking up. "The government doesn't think we have enough artillery shells."

"They're probably right," I said darkly. "Do guns even hurt Endbringers?"

"No," said Mom. At the same time, Dad said "Maybe."

"They might," Dad said. "I don't see what a superhero's fist can do that a fifty kilo explosive shell fired out of a cannon can't."

"Fists don't work either," said Mom.

"Then why do people keep punching them? And why does the government spend so many of our tax dollars making weapons?"

"Stupidity and morale, respectively," said Mom.

"I might be out late, too," I said.

Mom looked up for the first time. "Where?" she asked, at the same time as Dad asked "Why?"

"With a friend. Maybe. I don't know what her plans are right now." Blitzkrieg still hadn't surfaced. I couldn't imagine what it was up to.

"I don't know, Taylor," said Mom. "If that thing comes back..."

"I'll be way far away from the water," I said. "Miles away, on high ground."

Dad chimed in. "These are the rules: You're going to call me if you aren't coming straight home from school, and you're going to be home by six."

Six? What was I, made of spun glass? On the other hand, given the ongoing natural disaster a curfew wasn't unreasonable. "Fine."

It struck me that there had never been an Endbringer quite like this before. It came, it went, it came back, it went somewhere else. The entire eastern seaboard was uncertain about whether or not to sound the alarm. I had more information than most people and even I didn't have a clue what it was up to, other than Armsmaster's road theory. It hadn't even killed all that many people.

School was as boring and devoid of educational content as usual. I tuned it all out; history, math, everything. My attention was on my spiderweb of portals. Just as lunch ended, my diligence paid off when I detected Blitzkrieg's characteristic sideways rain. I followed it to its centre and was rewarded with metaphorical front-row seats to Blitzkrieg emerging from the water fifty kilometres off the coast. It took off like a shot towards land, aiming somewhere between Brockton Bay and Boston.

I didn't head to my next class. This was phase 2 of my new-and-improved plan. It was true that it would be unwise to risk life and limb in any death-defying escapades, but I didn't need to. My power had a global range. The least I could do was test Blitzkrieg's defences while I waited for the world's greatest heroes to get back to me.

I slipped off somewhere I wouldn't be seen and took a portal to my previously-established command centre on a desolate Pacific island. I had prepared the site in advance with standing portals to several locations of interest, including sixteen presently-empty Pacific islands very, very, very far away from both me and each other. These would be my arsenals.

I went to the islands one by one and loaded sixty-four portal cubes with ten-kilogram rocks. I had to be careful to drop them straight down, because if they drifted too much while falling they would hit the portal boundaries and pop prematurely. If that happened, depending on how long it had been in there the resulting explosion could pop other cubes and cause a chain reaction that cost me three other cubes. That was why the arsenals were so far away from each other and my command centre; I didn't want to be near the things.

The whole process took eight minutes. I wanted to make more, but my cubes lasted ten minutes at most before the forces inside popped them. If I waited any longer I would start losing the oldest ones. Sixty-four was the most I could reliably do in my experiments.

As aforementioned, Blitzkrieg could move 200 km/h and had emerged 50 kilometres off the coast, which meant it would take 15 minutes to reach. I had spent 8 minutes arming up, so I had 7 minutes left to shoot without risking collateral damage. More than enough.

I had lost my clear view of Blitzkrieg shortly after it emerged. The amount of water in the air around it made a total barrier to my clairvoyance. That was one obstacle I would need to deal with. Blitzkrieg was moving in a straight line, so I prepared the field in front of it. I wanted to do everything I was going to before it reached land, which didn't give me a lot of space or time. I made ten extra-large portals, each leading to a matching one in the upper atmosphere. The intense pressure difference caused the cubes to suck in air like vacuum cleaners.

That was all I had time for before Blitzkrieg reached my prepared area, but it was enough. The portals sucked a portion of the rain out of the air and spilled it out into the upper atmosphere, clearing it enough for me to get a sense of Blitzkrieg's location.

I selected the oldest cube in my arsenal and opened a portal below it pointing directly at Blitzkrieg's head. Then I dismissed the cube, releasing rock trapped inside.

I had done the math in advance. A ten-kilogram rock falling without wind resistance for eight minutes gained a speed of 9.8 m/s/s * 480 s = 4,704 m/s. Its energy, therefore, was 1/2 * 10 * 4,704^2 or 110,638,080 joules, better expressed as 1.1 * 10^8, or roughly ten times the kinetic energy of a tank shell (albeit without the explosion). On top of this was the energy of the air in the box, which weighed about a kilogram, was travelling just as fast as the rock, and added the energy of an extra tank shell.

The rock hit Blitzkrieg between the eyes. It flipped head over tentacles – now that it was out of the water I could see that it had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of an octopus. Before it landed I emptied the next three oldest boxes into its chest, emptying one of my arsenals and pile-driving it back into the water.

Blitzkrieg surfaced a dozen meters away. It didn't immediately start moving again. It cocked its head to the side like it was listening for something.

I decided to wait for Blitzkrieg to move again. As long as it wasn't getting closer to land, time was on my side. It took me less time to shoot than it did to reload, so if I spent my shots as quickly as I could each shot would be less powerful than the last. Better to play slow and steady and wait for them to finish – I decided the word I'd use for that was 'cooking.' My most recent boxes were only a minute old, which (if my calculations were correct) made them one sixty-fourth as powerful as the eight-minute boxes because of the power-of-two figure in my equation.

Blitzkrieg cocked its head the other way, then back. With one hand it plucked a hailstone out of the air. Water collected on it and froze until the hailstone was the size of a softball. With pure hydrokinesis, it flung the hailstone -

My range was one kilometre, so there needed to be a straight line less than a kilometre long between me and anything I wanted to sense. I had one open portal near Blitzkrieg. It was six inches across and put us five hundred metres apart. The hailstone's trajectory would take it through the portal with barely enough space, out, arcing just so to hit me in the head.

I closed the portal and only then realized that I wasn't close enough to sense it and had track it down again. When I found it it was racing for its original destination.

The instant I made a portal close enough to sense Blitzkrieg it threw another hailstone at me through it. This time I opened a new one before closing the first. Again, instantly, without even a glance, it threw a hailstone at me.

I opened a third portal and then four more under my four next-oldest cubes. Two of my shots hit Blitzkrieg from the left side and knocked it over sideways into the water. The other two missed.

Rather than let Blitzkrieg get up, I emptied all fifty-four of my remaining cubes into it one after another. By the end I wasn't sure if I was just hitting empty water, but this test needed to end. My plan did not include being shot at at this juncture.

When I was done I closed my portals and sat down on the beach to process.

If I went back to school I would be just barely in time for my first class after lunch. If I re-engaged...

I couldn't sense Blitzkrieg directly because it was a living thing, and I hadn't looked directly at it since the first shot. I didn't know how much I had hurt it, if at all.

Re-engage? Later. My potshots were apparently enough to get its attention, but my main takeaway from that was that Blitzkrieg could sense me through a six-inch portal five hundred metres away. Just great; the Endbringers had invisible powers too. None of my reading had even hinted at that. I'd thought they were just dumb brutes.

If I was going to re-engage, I was damn well going to get all my ducks in a row first. The most powerful thing I could cook up in twenty-four hours was not my A-game. I needed to be shooting actual tank shells with explosive payloads, or tungsten rods. I needed to do the acceleration in a vacuum to remove the speed limit so I could cook my shots for days instead of minutes. Heck, I was sure Armsmaster would have better ideas than me; as soon as I got in touch with him we could combine our powers to do ten times as much damage as either of us ever could alone.

None of that was possible if I died. I went back to school. Let Blitzkrieg smash roads for now, I'd be back.


End file.
